Computers are better at assessing personality than people?
So claims a new study. At first, I thought this would be due to artificial measurements and scales. That is, if you ask a random person to rate their friends on a 1-10 "openness to experience" scale, they might not know what a 7 actually means once you compare across the whole of the population. However, computers still did slightly better at predicting things like "field of study".
Given the amount of researcher degrees of freedom, (note that some of the results are presented for "compound variables" instead of measured responses) I think the safe conclusion is computers are as bad as people at reading other humans.